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2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

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Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#281

Post by jolmg »

bartread wrote: post #266
sumtechguy wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait?... people still spam there? Figured they had moved on long ago for better targets.... They must make some amount of money from it or they would not bother.

Surprised me too. I guess they must be, although I can't believe it's that much. I imagine probably the reason it still happens is that it's incredibly low effort and so therefore worth it even for meagre gains.

I don't really know how people do their spamming, but these may be long automated and forgotten systems. It may be that nobody has bothered to stop these systems or exclude usenet from being a target because there's no gain in doing that effort.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#282

Post by lixtra »

msla wrote: post #253
lixtra wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you deal with the (European) right to be forgotten? On one hand it’s nice that we can see all this old data. On the other hand, as far as I remember in the 90s you typically subscribed to a newsgroup and only then got recent posts. So the expectations was a limited life time of the post. Of course it would still be stored in thousands of readers. Obviously the copyright of each post is with the author. You jus…

> How do you deal with the (European) right to be forgotten? Probably by not being European. Europe doesn't make laws for the whole world anymore. Colonialism is dead.

What about copyright?

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#283

Post by [deleted] »

chubot wrote: post #174
chubot wrote: post #115

Hm this is making me feel old... because I used to frequent certain music newsgroups around 1995-2002, and the earliest one they have is from 2003. https://usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=rec.music.makers.p... Google does have some from 1998. It is this weird mix of people from 2016 replying to threads from 1998. The organization is very confusing which I'm sure contributes to the low quality. https://groups.google…

Wow this, is an insane life story: https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/drum-and-drummer-643105... This guy was apparently a genius drummer as a young man -- jammed with Jaco Pastorius, and a friend of John Medeski. Then a bodybuilder, steroid user (when it was legal), convicted felon, a sufferer of chronic illness, and epic Usenet flamewar participant. And deceased since 2012, but people still flame him on Usenet. h…

[deleted]

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#284

Post by jefftk »

Jaruzel wrote: post #190
72deluxe wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Some great stuff under there, including the ranting review of the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on TV from 1987: https://usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=alt.flame&g=224&p=0 Amazingly, you could replace most of the content of that post with "Star Trek Discovery" or "Star Trek Picard" and it'd be just like a recent post! I think The Next Generation fared well despite the slow first series. Fasc…

> Children on a starship. I won't even comment on the Cosby Family Goes to Outer Space. I can just see the plot development. Ratings sag, knock up the Security Officer. Awww. Cute baby scene. Actually, it was the Security Officer's Wife, Keiko. :D

Keiko was the wife of the transporter chief, no?

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#285

Post by kazinator »

chubot wrote: post #174
chubot wrote: post #115

Hm this is making me feel old... because I used to frequent certain music newsgroups around 1995-2002, and the earliest one they have is from 2003. https://usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=rec.music.makers.p... Google does have some from 1998. It is this weird mix of people from 2016 replying to threads from 1998. The organization is very confusing which I'm sure contributes to the low quality. https://groups.google…

Wow this, is an insane life story: https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/drum-and-drummer-643105... This guy was apparently a genius drummer as a young man -- jammed with Jaco Pastorius, and a friend of John Medeski. Then a bodybuilder, steroid user (when it was legal), convicted felon, a sufferer of chronic illness, and epic Usenet flamewar participant. And deceased since 2012, but people still flame him on Usenet. h…

> convicted felon

It was drummed-up charges. :)

> jammed with Jaco Pastorius

Another tragic case, sadly.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#286

Post by WEngeneer »

chubot wrote: post #115

Hm this is making me feel old... because I used to frequent certain music newsgroups around 1995-2002, and the earliest one they have is from 2003. https://usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=rec.music.makers.p... Google does have some from 1998. It is this weird mix of people from 2016 replying to threads from 1998. The organization is very confusing which I'm sure contributes to the low quality. https://groups.google…

because you are old my friend :)

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#287

Post by bartread »

jolmg wrote: post #281
bartread wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprised me too. I guess they must be, although I can't believe it's that much. I imagine probably the reason it still happens is that it's incredibly low effort and so therefore worth it even for meagre gains.

I don't really know how people do their spamming, but these may be long automated and forgotten systems. It may be that nobody has bothered to stop these systems or exclude usenet from being a target because there's no gain in doing that effort.

Possibly, although the content of the spam is fairly up to date: COVID nonsense and iPhone offers. That being said, now I look at the groups in more detail, it does seem like there's a concentration of messages in March and April on both these topics, and not a whole lot since.

What makes it stand out more is that a bunch of the newsgroups I've subscribed to are very inactive, it turns out. I just yanked in anything related to retro computing and gaming and am slowing pruning the list back to include only active groups.

The more active groups have spam but they also have self-promotional material that might or might not classify as spam, and I'm seeing a few mass crossposts as well.

Overall it's not as bad as I remember it being the last time I looked at getting back into usenet, which was probably 8 or 10 years ago. I think I perhaps gained a slightly skewed impression as the first few groups I went through were all pretty spammy.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#288

Post by pmachinery »

euroclear wrote: post #246
GNOMES wrote: post #245

Question as this was before my time. Was Usenet considered public or secure (possibly a foreign idea back then with computing)? Curious if there are any security implications to large archive projects like this, especially considering how early this was, people may have taken confidentiality lightly? I shudder at a potential early Myspace/Facebook archive in 20-30 years.

Usenet was public and distributed. Once you posted something, you had no real control over it being retained and archived. There was a message header you could set ("X-No-Archive: yes" IIRC), but it could not really be enforced.

X-No-Archive: yes was for Dejanews, and subsequently Google, and worked, at least in terms of what they publicly displayed on their site.

For about the past 20 years you don't need an archive though, with some Usenet service providers having posts going back to at least 2003 (with people talking about 2003 being a cut off for this archive, I suspect that's where much of the content is coming from).

Major Usenet providers required/had so much space for binaries they just stopped expiring text posts, which are a drop in the ocean by comparison.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#289

Post by UncleSlacky »

s1mon wrote: post #272
jcranmer wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Usenet originated, you needed to have an Internet-connected computer. In the late 80s, this was largely limited to university campuses, which meant that the process of educating new members on the social norms already in place largely only needed to happen for a few weeks in September. In September 1993, AOL offered Usenet access to any AOL subscriber. This gave rise to the term Eternal September.

Eternal September may have come long before that. I was at Carnegie Mellon from 86-90 as a student and until 93 as an employee. It was a very big deal to Usenet when they turned on Usenet access for anyone at CMU with an andrew.cmu.edu account (a few thousand people) I think around 87. There just weren't that many people on Usenet back then, so this was a big percentage increase. Also every year (well before 93) ther…

Penn State (PSU) was another place that gave out Usenet access to (I assume) all students in the late 80s/early 90s. A "PSUVM.EDU" address was a big warning sign.

Re: 2.1M of the oldest Usenet posts are now online for anyone to read

#290

Post by pmachinery »

raesene9 wrote: post #228

A whole thread about usenet and not even one mention of alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk ? Usenet culture and things like that group which was part of the empire of meow ( http://xahlee.info/Netiquette_dir/_/meow_wars.html ) are kind of interesting an represent a part of the Internet that seems lost, but probably still exists under all the shiney social media sites.

It's not interesting though, except to the handful of people who did it, it's even more boring now than it was at the time.

The main consequence of that flooding, disrupting and destroying of newsgroups is people moved on to the shiny social media sites, and Usenet was effectively killed off.

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